The rapid growth of technology has transformed how businesses interact with their customers in recent years. With consumers spending more time online and making more purchases from their smartphones, companies are investing in digital technologies to meet this growing demand.
Customers desire a more personalized and tailored experience, which means businesses can’t afford to not stay ahead of the curve when it comes to investing in digital first solutions. According to a recent State of the Connected Customer report, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is equally important as the services or products it provides.
Part of creating a highly personalized customer experience requires investing in the right customer relationship management software to efficiently manage customer data across multiple channels. Enter Salesforce and you get a powerful suite of tools that provide a 360-degree view of your customers from a single platform. The Salesforce CRM allows you to proactively manage customer relationships while equipping your sales reps and service teams with the tools they need to optimize the deal cycle and increase the profitability of your business.
Even amid a slowing economy, companies are continuing to invest in digital technologies such as Salesforce to avoid the risk of falling behind competitors and to increase operational productivity and efficiency. The ability to automate tedious business processes that cost companies countless amounts of money and time each year — U.S. businesses alone lose $3 trillion a year due to data errors and faulty information — make Salesforce a powerful tool for increasing the productivity of your business.
Automation across sales, service, and marketing allows your employees to focus more time on strengthening customer relationships and converting your prospects into valuable customers. Whether you’re investing in technology solutions to transform your customer relationships or to boost employee productivity, Salesforce continues hold the #1 spot by customers across the globe.
If you’re wondering how Salesforce can help you improve business productivity and efficiency while reducing sales and service costs, you’re in the right place. The purpose of this guide is to help Salesforce newbees and Salesforce enthusiasts alike learn more about:
In a 2021 Zapier report, 88% of small businesses state that automation allows them to compete with larger industries by allowing them to move faster, close leads quickly, spend less time on busywork, reduce errors, and offer better customer service. With 94% of workers stating that they perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks every single day, it’s no surprise that companies are investing in software to improve operational efficiency.
The beauty of the Salesforce platform is that it provides myriad ways to automate business processes that cost your business both time and money. Automation tools free your sales and services teams from process-heavy tasks as well as the need to jump from system to system.
While your sales team may spend several hours a day on necessary administrative tasks, automating these tasks allows your staff to spend their time more efficiently. Business process automation (BPA) can help you simplify repetitive tasks without the need for human intervention. From inventory management, to customer engagement, to sales, and marketing, automating your business processes means your employees have more time to spend on creative, enjoyable work and aren’t wasting company time searching through spreadsheets.
One of the concerns with increased automation in the workplace is that it will lead to layoffs and less job opportunities. Despite these fears, the future of automation technology is more about how automation can support employees by reducing time spent on boring, repetitive tasks. In fact, 65% of knowledge workers report being less stressed at work due to automating manual tasks.
Salesforce can help your best employees spend more time not only on being more efficient at work, but also more creative. Automation allows your team members to direct their focus to high value tasks such as building customer relationships and spend less hours on time-consuming processes such as data entry, document creation and management, and invoice management. Companies that adopt Salesforce have demonstrated an increase in sales productivity by as much as 34%. The automation tools that Salesforce provides can help you deliver a better customer experience, which translates to increased revenue and customer retention rates.
If you’re looking to grow your business and increase revenue, Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite of products — including core products such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud — that can get you there. Because the Salesforce platform provides a holistic view of your customers from a single platform, it’s easier than ever to effectively manage customer relationships across multiple channels.
For example, Salesforce can help you reduce your sales cost by offsetting new customer acquisition costs. Sales Cloud offers tools to engage with your existing customer base at the right time based on previous customer interactions with your company. Sales Cloud also offers visibility across all your relationships so that your sales and service teams can address at-risk accounts and provide current customers with new opportunities when they’re most likely to convert. AI tools such as Sale Cloud Einstein can help sales teams reach potential customers by examining prospect trends and recent engagements to automatically prioritize the most promising opportunities. Both large and small-scale companies report a 34% rise in sales revenue after implementing Sales Cloud as well as a 27% boost in win rates.
The ability to connect your sales, service, and marketing teams under a single platform allows your employees to deliver more personalized, quality customer experiences — a necessity for today’s customers who expect highly personalized engagements. With Marketing Cloud you can automate engagement across email, web, mobile, and more. This saves your team time spent on tedious tasks such as combing through marketing data and creating complicated social media calendars. You also have access to powerful analytics tools to help you make decisions geared towards profitability. After implementing Marketing Cloud, customers reported a 27% decrease in costs to acquire new customers, which will be a major focus for the foreseeable future.
Salesforce defines sales productivity as the result of a combination of sales efficiency and sales effectiveness. The difference between the two is that sales efficiency concerns maximizing the productive time your sales team has during the day where sales effectiveness is related to the actual outcome of that increased productivity.
For example, increased sales efficiency might mean that your sales team is making more calls each day, but true sales effectiveness means that 50% of those additional calls are converted into qualified opportunities. In this case, reaching maximum productivity requires integrating the right amounts of efficiency and effectiveness through utilizing valuable sales tools and automating business processes.
It's no surprise that companies are struggling with how to increase productivity when 58% of small business leaders state that one of the top constraints on their business activities is insufficient time. Salesforce takes a large degree of the guesswork out of maximizing your company’s productivity by allowing sales teams and key stakeholders to collaborate and drive revenue within a single, unified system. By focusing on productivity, businesses can increase profitability due to higher output from their sales teams and lower operating costs.
Five examples of how Salesforce serves as a productivity tool include:
Investing in technology solutions can improve productivity for your business, which means increased profit in the long-run. Some ways that investing in Salesforce can increase productivity include:
There are numerous ways that Salesforce can boost your company’s productivity, but here are 3 things you can do to maximize your ROI in the platform.
It can be difficult for companies to determine how their sales teams should spend their time and which opportunities they should focus on. With Sales Cloud, sales reps can utilize AI tools to make informed decisions about which opportunities are high and low value. AI tools such as Sales Cloud Einstein can help you predict which prospects are likely to convert and how you can adjust your business strategies accordingly.
The ability to automate time-consuming business processes with Salesforce means that your employees can spend more time on closing deals and growing revenue for your business. Salesforce offers a variety of sales engagement tools that provide valuable insight on a granular level into sales performance, areas that need attention, and how training can benefit your staff. For example, with Sales Engagement (formerly High Velocity Sales), you can provide your sales teams with the tools they need to succeed such as Work Queue automation, sales cadences, Lightning Dialer, and Einstein Lead Scoring.
Automation can improve the efficiency of your sales teams, lower operational costs, and empower your employees to focus on more enjoyable and creative work. In a world where customers expect tailored sales and service experiences, automation tools such as chatbots and sms messaging for customer service can help you retain customers and boost sales.
From automating your sales efforts to setting up inventory reminders when stock is low to automating email and ad campaigns, Salesforce automation tools can transform your business processes. We recommend looking for automation tools that can scale with your business. As your business grows and evolves, AI-driven tools such as Salesforce Einstein and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for advanced automation needs can help you reduce the need for human intervention.
Unlike other CRMs that may focus on one or two pieces of the customer journey, Salesforce has built their platform to excel at every step. From finding, closing, supporting, and extending the customer relationship, every critical piece of the true customer relationship can be improved by taking advantage of the Salesforce platform.
One of the biggest advantages of using Salesforce is that you gain a 360-degree view of your customers. Having the ability to access sales, service, and marketing data from a single, unified platform allows sales reps and marketers to reach customers at the right time at every step of the customer journey. Compared to other CRMs that require jumping from system to system, with Salesforce all of your customer data is centralized. Many Salesforce competitors lack this level of centralization, which can lead to a breakdown in communication among teams and a clunky customer experience. With Salesforce, sales reps can work in real time with customer service reps and marketers to deliver a seamless customer experience.
Being able to share data safely and securely among different departments is another reason that Salesforce beats out competitors time and time again. Salesforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the many tools that Salesforce provides in order to protect user data and confidentiality. All internal users who log in to Salesforce products (including partner solutions) through the user interface are required to use MFA.
Another benefit of using Salesforce is that it can scale and grow with your business. While other CRMs may claim to be adaptable for small and medium businesses as they grow, they often don’t provide integration across all areas of your business. Service-focused solutions may only focus on one business area while disregarding other areas such as sales and marketing. This can force businesses to purchase additional technology solutions to meet all of their operational needs, which means more costs and more time spent on integrating new systems.
With Salesforce, you have the ability to purchase a full range of sales, service, and marketing products that are all connected from a single platform. This can save your company money by reducing the need to purchase multiple technology solutions that may be difficult and costly to integrate.
Unlike many of its competitors, Salesforce provides affordable solutions for small businesses including a wide range of products, features, and tools that can help small and medium businesses grow. This includes access to AI-powered tools that learn with your business and improve with each customer interaction. Many of the product offerings and pricing tiers that Salesforce offers are aimed at small and medium businesses that want to start with a simple all-in-one sales and customer service tool.
There are countless examples of how Salesforce beats out its competitors in terms of functionality and flexibility, but we’ve decided to focus on 3 advantages Salesforce offers compared to other CRMs.
One of the greatest advantages of the Salesforce platform is that it’s accessible wherever you have internet — making it easier than ever for teams to stay up-to-date with their accounts and customers. Because Salesforce is a cloud product, customer data is kept safely and securely in the cloud, eliminating the need for a local server or filing cabinets full of customer records. The Salesforce mobile app also makes it easy to transition from desktop to mobile. For sales reps and service technicians who are constantly on-the-go, the Salesforce mobile app makes it easy to make smart decisions quickly and efficiently.
In addition to being highly accessible, the Salesforce platform is also user-friendly compared to many CRMs. The point-and-click tools offered by Salesforce makes it easy for team members with little-to-no technical experience to find their way around the platform and even create their own apps. Some examples of how end-users can customize their Salesforce org without writing code include:
With Salesforce, you can automate business processes through a simple point-and-click interface, making it effortless for teams to collaborate. Thanks to its intuitive user interface and user experience, there’s a reason that Salesforce continues to rank #1 compared to other CRMs.
Another advantage that Salesforce offers over competitors is the ability to customize the platform to fit your company’s unique needs and processes. Salesforce is designed for customization and configuration because the company understands that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work for most businesses. In addition to being able to customize the many cloud products that Salesforce offers, businesses can also easily develop and optimize their own apps. Salesforce provides a customizable CRM solution that any business can start with out of the box and configure to meet their needs.
In addition to being highly customizable, Salesforce can also be integrated with countless third-party systems and apps, making it easy to automate your company’s operational processes. With easy-to-use third-party data integration tools, you can create a more engaged customer and employee experience. With Salesforce, you can integrate separate systems — including data from an external ERP, Supply Chain, HR, or additional software such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Salesforce's approach to integration connects data across 4 layers of your application including:
Despite the many global challenges that companies have faced in the last couple of years — a pandemic, the supply chain crisis, labor challenges, rampant inflation — businesses are looking for ways to prepare themselves for the unforeseen economic challenges that will undoubtedly arise in the years to come.
This requires taking a hard look at the ways technology is used to benefit businesses and how companies can embrace technology solutions to meet the changing demands of customers and their employees.
Digital technology solutions are a fundamental part of how businesses operate and there’s no denying that automation will play a pivotal role in how companies function in the future.
Investing in the right CRM can help your business manage customer and employee relationships and deliver personalized customer experiences. Salesforce continues to lead the way for companies who are looking to increase productivity and adapt their businesses to meet the evolving needs of their customers.
If you’d like to learn more about how Salesforce can help your business, contact Kelley Austin today to get started.
At Kelley Austin we're proud to provide tailored Salesforce solutions across a variety of industries. Our expert knowledge and many years of experience in all aspects of the Salesforce ecosystem have earned us high levels of satisfaction from our clients.
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